1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus having a plurality of sheet storage units that stores sheets to be supplied to a printing unit, and also to a control method therefor, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional printing apparatus, there is a method for providing a plurality of sheet storage units that stores sheets to be supplied to a printing unit, and creating and utilizing a sheet storage unit group constituted by arbitrary sheet storage units out of these sheet storage units as discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-008360.
By creating the sheet storage unit group, for example, sheets to be used for printing can be restricted to the sheets set in the sheet storage units within the group. As a result, careless use of unintended sheets is prevented, accordingly management of the sheets has become easy.
Also, in a print job executed by designating sheet storage units to be used for print processing, by permitting only automatic switching between the sheet storage units limited within the group, the user can perform printing in which unintended use of the sheets is restrained, while making use of the plurality of sheet storage units. Accordingly, even when the sheets have run out in one sheet storage unit, sheet feeding from another sheet storage unit has become possible, without stopping an operation of the printer engine.
However, this sheet storage unit group has a problem that the user needs to have manually performed settings in advance for grouping which sheet storage units among a plurality of sheet storage units to the same group, which involves great time and effort, for example, in a case where a plurality of printing apparatuses exists.
To solve such a problem, a printing apparatus capable of automatically performing creation of the sheet storage unit groups is also discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2009-256074. In Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2009-256074, the sheet storage unit groups are formed by acquiring attributes of the sheets stored in the sheet storage units, and automatically grouping the sheet storage units for which identical paper sizes and paper types have been set.
In this way, in the conventional technique, the sheet storage unit groups are formed in each printing apparatus.
On the other hand, there exists a technique for copying settings performed on one printing apparatus into another printing apparatus, among a plurality of printing apparatuses. By copying into the other printing apparatus the settings of the sheet storage unit groups already formed in the printing apparatus, using this technique, time and effort involved for formation of the sheet storage unit groups with respect to the plurality of printing apparatuses can be reduced.
However, in a case where the settings of the sheet storage unit groups are copied into another printing apparatus, the following problem arises. That is, even if the settings have been directly copied into another printing apparatus, settings of the sheet storage unit groups of the copy source and settings of the sheet storage unit groups of the copy destination may not have the same configurations, depending on the situation of the sheets actually stored in the sheet storage units.
For example, assuming that first and second sheet storage units are grouped in a first printing apparatus to form a sheet storage unit group, consider that A4 size sheets are stored in both the sheet storage units.
By copying the settings of the sheet storage unit group into a second printing apparatus, first and second sheet storage units can also be grouped in the second printing apparatus to form a sheet storage unit group. At this time, similar to the first printing apparatus, in a case where A4 size sheets are contained in both the first and second sheet storage units, also in the second printing apparatus, there is no problem since the sheet storage unit groups formed in the first and second printing apparatuses each have the same configurations.
However, in a case where sheets in a size other than A4 size are contained in at least anyone of the first and second sheet storage units in the second printing apparatus, sheet storage unit groups having different configurations between the first printing apparatus and the second printing apparatus will be formed. In this case, there is a possibility that the second printing apparatus will perform sheet feeding operation against the user's intention.